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Welcome back everyone, to session four of our Lectio Bible study on Jesus, where we're studying the biblical and historical evidence for Christ. This is the last of the first half of the course where we're going to be looking at the Gospels. We've been focusing a lot on questions such as who wrote the Gospels, Are they reliable? What kind of books are they? What about the lost Gospels and the evidence for their reliability. And in this session, what we're going to do is ask one last question and that has to do with the dating of the Gospels. When were the Gospels written? And this is a very important question, if you're wanting to answer the predominant question, the main issue, who is Jesus? Because we want to ask about whether even if the Gospels were written by apostles and they were intended to be biographies, were the apostles or the authors actually able to accurately recount what Jesus did and what Jesus said, or had too much time passed, right, since the events themselves. Because one of the issues in history is that as time passes, our memories fade, right? They get distorted, they change. And so skeptics will sometimes say, okay, maybe the Gospels were actually written by apostles and their companions, but when were they written? Are they too late to be reliable? That's the question we're looking at in this session. And again, I'm going to go back to the words of Bart Ehrman, that scholar I mentioned, he atheist scholar, but a very prominent New Testament scholar in the United States, and his statement of what he calls the problem of the time gap between the events of Jesus life around 30 to 33 AD and his public ministry and his passion and death, and then the time of the composition of the Gospels. This is how Ehrman describes the problem of the time gap between Jesus and the Gospels. He says this quote, scholars typically date the New Testament Gospels to the latter part of the first century. Most everyone would agree that Jesus died sometime around 30 CE. And let me pause here, CE is just another an academic way of referring to AD sometimes. So it means the same thing. It just means common error. So 30 CE or 30 AD Mark was the first Gospel to be written, probably around 65 to 70 CE. Matthew and Luke were written about 15 to 20 years after that, say 80 to 85 CE. And then John was written last around 90 to 95 CE. Now what is significant here is the time gap involved. The very first surviving account of Jesus Life was written 35 to 40 years after his death. Our latest canonical Gospel was written 60 to 65 years after his death. That's obviously a lot of Time. End quote. So notice what's Ehrman saying there? He's saying that there's a substantial time gap between the actual events and. And the writing down of the Gospels. And again, if you remember from our sessions one and two, if your view of the Gospels is that they were originally anonymous, in other words, we don't know who wrote them, and that the stories in them are like the children's game of telephone, kind of more like folklore. And there have been 40 or 50 or 60 years between the life of Jesus and the writing down of these books. You can see why that would lead you to have a more skeptical attitude toward what they say about Jesus. Right. That would be a reasonable response to view the Gospels in a skeptical light. So what I want to ask in this session is, well, when were the Gospels written? And more importantly, how do we know? I always tell my students this in class. Whenever your professor says anything, including myself, always ask, well, how do you know that? What are your reasons for that position? And it can't just be, well, because all. All New Testament scholars say so. Right? You can't make an argument from majority or opinion. You have to give me some solid historical reasons here. And in this case, I actually, once again, would say that the dates that Ehrman's giving here of the Gospels being written in the late first century is the majority opinion. Well, for the late 20th century, okay. It's not what people believed for the first 19 centuries of Christianity, but today it is the majority opinion. And so you might be asking yourself, well, how do we know? How do you arrive at those dates? And it's really easy. If you open the Gospels, you'll see they have copyright dates at the beginning. Okay, that did not land. That was a joke. Okay, thank you. Can we add a laugh track somewhere? Okay. No, they don't come with copyright dates. In fact, I own books in my own personal library that are from the 1800s that don't have copyright dates. They. It's a very recent development that you would add an explicit date of publication onto a document. Ancient documents often did not explicitly identify the date. In fact, ironically, it's often much harder to determine the exact date of an ancient book than it is to determine who wrote the book. And yet, in many, many classrooms, and this was my own experience studying the Bible and history, students are often presented with these dates first, as if these are facts, and then everything else flows out of them, when, in fact, it's actually very difficult oftentimes to date the Gospels. So since they weren't published with copyrights. How do scholars today arrive at these dates and say that Mark was written around 70 AD, 40 years after Jesus. Matthew and Luke were about 15 years later, say 85. And then John was written at the very end of the first century, around 95 A.D. how, how do they get these dates? Where do they come from? And the answer is very simple. They get them from internal evidence in the Gospels about events that we know of from history. And there's really one main event that scholars use to do this, and it's the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D. so you may or may not know this, but 40 years after Jesus was crucified. So Jesus is crucified sometime around 30 to 33 A.D. we don't again know exactly what year. It's very difficult to figure out even the exact date of the crucifixion. But 40 years after that, in 70 AD the Roman armies came into Jerusalem and they burned the city to the ground. They tore the temple down, and they massacred about a million Jews. It was a horrific war. It's called the Jewish Roman War. And that destruction of the Jerusalem Temple was the end of the most sacred site in Judaism all the way from the time of King David and King Solomon, under whom the temple was built, all the way to Jesus day. Okay, so when the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. that was it. To this day, there is no temple in Jerusalem. You can go to Jerusalem today and you'll see the wailing wall. I don't know if any of you have been to the Wailing Wal wall. Even those stones that you see in the wailing wall, those are from the slab, what we call the slab, the foundation stones. The temple itself is gone. Okay, so Jesus in the Gospels predicts that the temple will be destroyed within one generation. And so those prophecies of the Temple's destruction are the only. Watch this. The only evidence scholars have for actually dating them. And the way the logic of the argument works is this. Since we know that people cannot prophesy the future, and since Jesus was right about the Temple being destroyed within a generation, therefore the Gospels must have been written after the Temple was destroyed and not before. It's called prophecy ex eventu or prophecy. Prophecy after the fact from the event. So if you have the gospel of Mark 13, 1, 2, or Luke 19:43, 44, let's look at a couple of Jesus prophecies, and you'll see these are the texts by which scholars date the Gospels to the late first century A.D. so the first one is from Jesus famous Olivet discourse, the discourse on the Mount of Olives. In Mark 13, 1, 2, you remember the story. They get to Jerusalem at the end of Jesus public ministry. And the disciples, who are kind of country bumpkins, you know, they're from Galilee, they're awestruck by the grandeur of the city of Jerusalem and by the splendor of the temple. And this is what the Gospel says. Quote, as Jesus came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, look, teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings. And Jesus said to him, do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here. One stone upon another that will not be thrown down. Mark chapter 13, verse 1 through 2. And there are parallels also in Matthew 24, 12 and Luke 19:41, 44. We'll read those in just a second. So all three of them, the first Gospels, the synoptic Gospels, they're called Matthew, Mark and Luke because they're very similar. They all contain these prophecies of Jesus that the temple would be destroyed. And they not only contain prophecies, they're very explicit. Jesus is very detailed about his description of the temple destruction. So if you look at the next quotation, this is from the Gospel of Luke. 19:43, 44. In Luke's gospel, when Jesus comes into the city of Jerusalem and he sees the city, you might recall, what does he start to do. He weeps. He weeps over the city. Jesus only cries two times in the Gospel. He weeps at the death of his friend Lazarus in the Gospel of John, chapter 11. And then he weeps over the city of Jerusalem in Luke chapter 19, because it's going to be destroyed. And this is what Jesus says in this kind of prophecy about the city. He says, quote, days shall come upon you when your enemies will cast up a bank around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and dash you to the ground, you and your children within you. 1943, 44 of Luke's gospel, there, what Jesus is doing is depicting the city as a woman, which is something that happens often in the Old Testament. Jerusalem is like a bride. God is the bridegroom. And then the citizens of Jerusalem are like the children of the mother city. That's actually where we get the word metropolis from. The Greek word mater means mother, polis means city. So a metropolis is a mother city. So Jesus is depicting Jerusalem as a mother filled with her children. And he's saying, one day her enemies are going to come. They're going to surround her. In other words, they're going to besiege her, they're going to cast the stones of the temple to the ground and they're going to destroy her children, namely the citizens of Jerusalem. And I don't have the quotations in my notes here, but in Mark 13, in Matthew, Jesus says all this will take place within one generation. A biblical generation is about 40 years. And sure enough, within 40 years, 40 years later, in 70 A.D. what happened? The Romans came. They laid siege to the city of Jerusalem. They surrounded it, trapped the Jewish citizens within it and then massacred them and destroyed the city, burned it to the ground. In fact, Josephus, who I've mentioned in previous sessions, was a first century Jewish historian. He actually was a participant in the Roman war. He wasn't just a priest, he was in the military. And he said that the romans were crucifying 500 Jews a day when they besieged the city. They crucified so many of the Jewish citizens that they deforested the whole area around Jerusalem. They ran out of trees. There weren't enough trees to put all the bodies up. Can you see why Jesus would weep if he foresees this event coming to pass? Okay, so these texts that I've given to you, this is why scholars say Mark was written in 70 A.D, sometime around 70 A.D. the idea is that we know Jesus can't have actually predicted it. Therefore the Gospel must have been written after the fact. Therefore we can use the prophecy of the temple's destruction to date the first Gospel Mark sometime around that event, and then the other gospels after that, giving time for Mark to circulate and Matthew and Luke to copy elements of it and write their own gospels. And then John finally comes. Now I'm simplifying it, but that's the basic thrust. Now there's a certain plausibility to that, right? If I were, for example, to give you a detailed description of the twin towers, right, being hit by airplanes and coming down a catastrophic event of 9, 11, you would assume that account had been written after the fact because no one was expecting that, right? Everybody remember that event. I mean, it's etched in our memories. So if you found an account of that, you would think, oh well, this must have been written after. The problem though is even if you don't believe in prophecy, even if you don't believe in the divinity of Jesus, just from a historical perspective, that argument falls apart because the Jewish temple had already been destroyed once before. Does anybody remember? It was by the Babylonians in 5, 87 B.C. so 600 years, almost before the time of Christ, there was a pagan empire, Babylon, that rose up, came into conflict with Judah and then what ended up happening? They came into the city and they destroyed the temple and they laid siege to it and then they burned it to the ground. And in the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament, this takes place in the books of Kings. You can look at 2 Kings, chapter 15, 17, or 2 Kings 24, 25 if you want a detailed account of the wars that led up to eventual destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. In the Jewish scriptures, this was depicted as the result of Israel's sin. As they continued to break the law, the weight, so to speak, of their sin mounted up and eventually God handed them over to the pagan enemies who came in and destroyed Jerusalem and burned the temple to the ground. Now, of course, after they went into exile, the Jews came back and they rebuilt the temple and it was that second temple that was in place all the way down to Jesus day. But Jesus wasn't the only Jewish prophet who said that one day that second temple would also be destroyed. And you don't even have to have been divine to recognize that in the first century, by the time of Jesus life, there was already starting to be conflict between the Jewish people and the Roman Empire and that things might turn out the way they had the last time the Jews had revolted against pagan overlord, namely the temple being destroyed. And we know some other Jewish prophets, Josephus himself tells us, who were also saying that the temple was going to be destroyed. So using that prophecy to date the book is really problematic just from a historical perspective. It's even more problematic from the perspective of faith because as Christians, we actually believe that prophecy is what possible. Okay, this is important because we believe that God is omniscient. He knows everything. He knows everything that ever has happened and he knows everything that ever will happen. Right. So the idea that it's impossible for a prophet, much less the divine son of God, Jesus, which we'll come back to that later, I know we haven't proved that yet, to predict the future is something that as a Christian, that's not a problem for us to believe that Jesus foresaw the temple actually being destroyed. Even him giving the details of it being besieged and then torn down, those are based on. Those could easily be based on the way it had been destroyed before. In other words, history is going to do what, repeat itself? That's exactly right. Okay. Now that's the primary reason the Gospels get dated to the late first century A.D. but there is a second reason that's actually important, but it's a little complicated. So just, I'm warning you now, this is one of the most complicated issues in New Testament studies. And I almost, I almost didn't put a book, a chapter in my book, the Case for Jesus. I almost didn't put a chapter on the dating the Gospels just because it gets, it can get so complicated so quickly, right? So I'm going to try and make it as simple as possible. But I ended up doing it because this is a really important question that I found. A lot of people wanted to know, they wanted to know how, how close in proximity were the Gospels to the events they purport to describe? Because that's a good historical question about any source, right? If I gave you an account of some event and I lived a thousand years after it, you're going to say, well, how do you know what happened? But if I tell you about my own life or I tell you about events that I've witnessed, you're more inclined to trust my testimony. Okay, so this is a good question. And the second issue then is the so called synoptic problem. Now, what is the synoptic problem? It may not be a problem for you, but it's a problem for a lot of scholars and it revolves around the question of the relationship between the first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, which are called the Synoptic Gospels because they see Jesus in similar ways. They're very similar to one another. Optic comes from the Greek word for seeing. Sun means together. So they look with one another, so to speak, at Jesus. They see things in the same way. And if you've ever sat down and read Matthew, Mark and Luke consecutively, you'll know what I mean by this and what scholars mean by this. They have not just the same actions of Jesus or the same words of Jesus, but they say them in the same words and in the same order. Right? So, for example, if I were a professor and I had assigned my students to write a gospel, you know, go home, your assignment this week is to write a gospel, bring it in and turn it in on Monday. And then I got Matthew, Mark and Luke in my mailbox at the seminary, I would suspect that there had been some copying going on. Right? Okay. Some plagiarism, so to speak, that's used a modern term, right. I would probably call those three students in and say, okay, Matthew, Mark, Luke, sit down, sit down. Okay, who copied from who? Right? Because you can't have extensive verbatim agreement miraculously Somebody was relying on someone else. So who wrote first, who wrote second, who wrote third, who copied from whom? And then, of course, we'd have to have an investigation or whatever, and they'd be penalized. But in ancient times, that's not how things worked. And although there's definitely evidence that there is a literary relationship between these three books, we don't really know what it is. So scholars call it the synoptic problem. And what scholars have done has spent thousands and thousands and thousands of hours studying the three books and trying to figure out who was first, who was second, who was third, and who was copying from whom. That's the problem for the first 19 centuries. Once again, the predominant theory was that Matthew wrote first, Mark wrote second, Luke wrote third, and John wrote last. Okay? And that Mark and Luke both drew on Matthew, but that John was kind of doing his own thing. All right. I don't know if any of you watch Sesame street had kids or maybe watch Sesame Street. I did. I grew up. There were these. I don't know what you'd call them, these little vignettes where they'd say, one of these kids is doing his own thing. They'd show four different kids. He had to pick out which one was different. That's John's gospel. He was the guy who was doing his own thing. And Matthew, Mark and Luke are doing six similar things, right? So scholars try to figure out who copied from whom. And one of the solutions to that problem in the last hundred years that has arisen is called the two source theory or the two source hypothesis. And I've got it outlined for you here. It basically proposes this number one. Mark wrote first, and Matthew and Luke wrote after Mark and copied from Mark. So he's the one who was the original, and they copied from him second. According to the two source hypothesis, Matthew and Luke wrote independently of one another. In other words, they were both copying from Mark, but they didn't look at each other. It'd be like if a kid was in a classroom taking a test, and then the two other kids on one side and his right and his left who don't know their stuff as well. They both copied from him, but not from one another. Okay? That's the idea. So they're independent of one another. And the reason this theory takes that view is because think about the infancy narratives, how different they are. Only Matthew has the magi and the star of Bethlehem. Only Luke has the shepherds, right? And the Annunciation. And so scholars will say, well, why wouldn't they share Some of that. The best explanation is they don't know one. Another number three, according to this theory, there are parallels between Matthew and Luke. It actually seem to be copied from another source that we don't have access to. And so scholars who were mostly. These are mostly Germans, they came up with a German word, kvela, that means source and they abbreviated it with the letter Q. Have any of you ever heard of Q? The Gospel of Q? People ask me about this all the time. Tell me, Dr. Petrie, what is the Gospel of Q? And I always tell them it's made up, it's imaginary. It's basically an attempt to explain all the parallels, but between Matthew and Luke that aren't in Mark. Like the account of Jesus, three temptations in the wilderness, that's in Matthew and Luke, but it isn't in Mark. Not the details. Okay, so according to this view, Mark writes first sometime around 70, then Matthew and Luke, about 15 years later, independently get a copy. They use Mark, but they compose their own gospels using him as a source. Okay. That's where the dates for Matthew and Luke come from. Of 1885. Once again, there's no copyright date. Matthew or Luke never says, I'm writing around 85 A.D. right. It's just a theory based on the presumption that Mark probably needed about 10 or 15 years to circulate so that Matthew and Luke could get their hands on it and then copy it. Do we have any evidence that that is the case? No. Do we have any church fathers who say that's the case? No. Is there a single copy of Q in existence anywhere? Say no. No. Good. All right, good. Very good. Very good. Now, I only bring this up because I used to be a huge Q believer. Again, I'm telling you theories that I used to hold myself, I'm not trying to criticize them or say they're stupid. I believed these for a long time. I have a whole shelf of books at home just on Q. But after about 10 years of studying, I started to get have some doubts about it because I realized that every scholar's book was talking about a different document. Because the document only existed in their imagination. There isn't any hard evidence to work with. And I began to wonder, are we doing history here? Is this how history works? I don't know. I think history works with actual texts. Okay, so there are some problems there. All right, so that's it. If you ever wondered, how do we get these late first century dates for the Gospels? I just basically summed up the two main pieces of evidence. But there are real problems with this theory. And I think there are some reasons for thinking the Gospels may in fact be earlier. So let me just share those with you briefly. Weaknesses of these arguments for a late dating of the Gospels, late first century, first and foremost, the very prophecies about the temple's destruction that scholars use to date the Gospels after the event also contain evidence that they were probably written before the event. If you read them carefully, you'll see there's contrary evidence there. For example, look at some of these words of Jesus in Mark, chapter 13, verse 14. In Mark's account, Jesus says this. When you see the abomination of desolation set up where it ought not to be, and this means the desecration of the Jewish temple. He's alluding to a prophecy in Daniel that the temple would be destroyed again one day and desolated. He says, pray that it may not happen in winter. Now why does that matter? Well, this is really important. In 70 A.D. when the Romans came in, they destroyed the temple in late summer. Okay? And everyone knew exactly when the temple was destroyed. That date is still commemorated to this day in some Jewish circles as a very solemn day of mourning for the destruction of the temple. Well, if Mark knew that the temple had been destroyed in the summer, why would he tell his people in a made up prophecy after the fact to pray that it not happen in winter? It seems like a useless addition, right? And it gets worse, because if you look at Matthew, he adds something to it. In Matthew, Jesus says, so when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet of Daniel, pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a Sabbath. Now why would Jesus tell the apostles to pray that they wouldn't have to flee on a Sabbath? Well, it's because according to Jewish law, you could only go a certain distance on the Sabbath day without breaking the commandment against violating Sabbath rest. Okay, so if the war happened and the temple was being destroyed or besieged on a Sabbath, you wouldn't be able to travel far enough to get out of the city and you'd be caught up in it. You follow? Now that makes perfect sense if it's an actual prophecy of Jesus to the disciples to pray that the event not happen on a Sabbath. But it really doesn't make sense for Matthew to add that to Jesus teaching. If it's 15 or 20 years after the event already took place, why would his readers need a warning to pray that it did not happen on the Sabbath? If it happened 20 years ago it would be like me again writing the document says, pray that the Twin Towers won't be destroyed. Or on a Sunday when we all know that it happened on a Wednesday. I don't remember exactly what day it happened, but do you see the analogy there? Does that make sense? It doesn't make sense in a text after the fact. All right, and then Luke, same thing. He adds, when you see Jerusalem by armies, let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart. Let not those who are in the country try to enter it. Why is he adding these warnings not to try to get into the city 20 years after it's already happened? They don't really make sense that way. But it makes perfect sense if these are actual prophecies of Jesus to the disciples about what to do when they see this event coming on the horizon. And you know what? We have evidence from the church fathers that the Christians in Jerusalem, when they saw that the war was about to come to a head, they escaped from Jerusalem, they left and they went to a city called Pella. And they didn't die in Jerusalem because they obeyed the prophecies of Jesus who had told them what was going to happen and told them to get out ahead of time. Isn't that fascinating? Right, so we know this from history. It's a very important point. And then last but certainly not least, in the book of Acts, chapter 11, we see something very interesting here. I'm not going to quote the full passage, but one of the things the gospels never do is say that Jesus prophecy was fulfilled. If they were written after the temple was destroyed, why didn't Matthew or Mark or Luke say, and so it happened after the conclusion of Jesus prophecy? I mean, that's a big prophecy to say that the temple would be destroyed. And if it happened, wouldn't you want your readers to know that he was a true prophet? What's interesting is that in Acts chapter 11 it tells us about this prophet named Agabus, who nobody's ever heard of, who foretold through the Spirit that there would be a famine in the time of the Emperor Claudius, which was like the 40s. And it took place, sure enough, there was an empire wide famine. And so what does Luke say in Acts 11:28, this took place in the days of Claudius. Now if Luke tells you that some unknown prophet's prophecy was fulfilled and it happened, why wouldn't he tell you that Jesus most momentous prophecy of all, had been fulfilled? I'll give you one explanation because it hadn't been fulfilled yet. Right. And he couldn't say it had happened because it hadn't yet happened. Does that make sense? So in other words, all that to say there are reasons actually to doubt that the Gospels are after the destruction of Jerusalem. Now, there are many other things we could say, but we're running out of time. In the book, I take you through various solutions to the synoptic problem. And I'll also point out to you that this theory that Ehrman lays out for you there, the two source hypothesis, that's only one solution. There are actually many different solutions to this theory. It's very complicated. There's an Augustinian theory where Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is the order. There's a Greecebach theory, there's a Farr theory. There are all these different theories. And the reason there are all these different theories is because at the end of the day, we don't know exactly who copied for who and exactly what the order was because we weren't there. Right. Joseph Fitzmeyer, who was a Jesuit, Catholic, biblical scholar, very famous scholar, said, at the end of the day, the synoptic problem is probably insoluble. In other words, we can't solve it because we don't have access to the kind of information we would need to sort that out. I mean, if any of you ever had students copy from one another, you know, it can be very tricky to find out exactly what happened, even when you have the people right there. I mean, I don't even remember how I wrote my own books, like which chapter was first, and I don't know. I don't know. Here's the book. It's finished. You know, so like the writing complex, the writing process is very complicated. And so we need to be humble about what we might actually be able to solve. But I would end with one last observation that for me, really changed my mind on thinking that the Gospels are not from the late first century, but much closer to the time of Jesus. And that's from the ending of the Acts of the Apostles. Anybody read the Acts of the Apostles? Wonderful book of the New Testament, the first history of the early church. First half of it is about the life and the activities of Peter and John in Jerusalem. And then the rest of the book is about the Apostle Paul. But if you read, it's a very exciting book and it goes along telling you all about Paul's life. And then you get to Acts 28, the last chapter, and all of a sudden it just stops, like abruptly. It just ends. With Paul in prison in Rome. And it says this, Acts 28:14, 16. This is how the book ends. And so we came to Rome, meaning Luke and Paul and the other companions and the brethren there, when they heard of us, came as far as the forum of Appius and the three taverns to meet us. Good Catholics here. Let's meet the tavern. That was another joke. It's okay. It's okay. They'll add a laugh track. It's all going to work. Catholics, let's meet at the tavern. Right. Okay. So on seeing them, Paul thanked God and took courage. And when we came into Rome, Paul was allowed to stay by himself with the soldier that guarded him. And he, Paul, lived there for two whole years at his own expense, welcomed all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God, teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered. And a book. Now, according to the major theory, the majority opinion I gave you at the beginning, Acts is probably written around 85 or 90, almost 30 years, 30 more years after Paul was executed in the 60s. Now, if Luke knew Paul, his hero, had been martyred in Rome under Caesar Nero, why would he just stop the book right here? Why wouldn't he go on to tell you about the martyrdom of St. Paul? I mean, after all, he spends a whole chapter on the martyrdom of Stephen. He spends two chapters on the martyrdom of Jesus Christ. I mean, Paul's Luke's hero. Why wouldn't he tell about how Paul died? Well, I'll give you an explanation. Because Paul hadn't died yet when he finished the book. And as a historian, when you're writing history, you can only take it up to the present, right? I don't know if any of you ever read George Weigel's biography of Pope John Paul ii. I read it years and years ago, and the first edition of the book only goes up to, I think, 1999 or 2001. It ends when John Paul II was beginning to show signs of Parkinson's and, you know, starting to decline in his health and whatnot. But it just stops kind of in the middle. It doesn't go on to narrate John Paul's dramatic decline and then his death, where he really showed us how to suffer and how to die. It was beautiful to watch the Pope continue to minister to the church and the world, even though he's going through such agony and suffering. And you might think, weigel, George Weigel. Why didn't you include that material in your biography? And the answer is, well, because it hadn't happened yet. Right. And I would suggest to you, the same thing's true of Acts, that it was actually written while Paul was still alive around 62 AD. And if that's the case, and if Luke is copying from Mark, and if Luke may even be using Matthew, then were the Gospels written in the late first century, 80s, 90s? No. Actually, you can make a case that they were written sometime before 62 AD, right. So either in the 50s or even as early as the 40s, it gets hard to know, but it's much closer to the event to. Does that make sense, Everybody following me here. So, in other words, when it comes to the dating of the Gospels, and this is important, whether you take the earlier dating I'm suggesting to you, which has been believed for 19 centuries, right. Or you take even the later dating of 80s and 90s, either one, it's still written within the living memory of the events within the lifetime of the apostles. This is really important. Okay. I don't know if any of you ever read Elie Wiesel's book Night. It was an account of his experience of the Jewish Holocaust. Now, Elie Wiesel just died, right? So he wrote about his experience in the early 40s, but he was continuing to write about this into the 1990s. And he just died recently in this millennium. Now, would you go and say to elie Wiesel in 1992, well, I can't trust your account. Holocaust because it was 40 years ago or 50 years ago? No, because he was within the living memory of the events. And the same thing is true about the time frame of the Gospels, even if you take the later date. But if you take the much earlier date, it's even more profound. These are biographies of Jesus written by eyewitnesses or the companion of apostles within the lifetime of the people who experienced them. And with that conclusion in mind, I think it lays solid historical groundwork. You don't have to have faith, just reason, just history to say that these books give us reliable accounts of what Jesus did and what Jesus said and who he claimed to be. So when we come back in the next session, we're going to actually dive into the Gospels and ask, who is Jesus and how did he, or did he fulfill prophecies of the Jewish Messiah? Let's see them.